I wrote up an analysis of the Stephen King novel years ago; if you’re interested, Dear Reader, you can find it here. In that analysis, I made only one or two brief references to Kubrick’s film adaptation, which everyone ought to know by now is wildly different from the novel (much to King‘s annoyance).
I also felt, when I wrote that analysis, that an in-depth analysis of Kubrick’s film would be unnecessary, as others had already done so. I’ve since changed my mind about that, since I feel that an analysis of the themes of Kubrick’s adaptation will put the spotlight on a lot of issues most relevant to our world today.
I’ll discuss changes from the novel to the movie only as pertinent to these issues as Kubrick’s version addresses them. The story is no longer merely about an aspiring writer battling with alcoholism (a semi-autobiographical issue that King had been dealing with at the time of writing his novel), but rather about how issues of settler-colonialism in the US intersect with capitalism, racism, sexism, and family abuse.
Given the troubled state the US is in now (and how that affects the rest of the world), Kubrick’s film seems to be gifted with “the shining” in how it, 46 years ago as of the publication of this blog article, predicted the intersecting of those above-mentioned problems, leading to today’s nightmare as I see it allegorized in this film.
Anyway, the 1980 film was produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and written by him and Diane Johnson. It stars Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and Danny Lloyd, with Scatman Crothers, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone, Joe Turkel, and Tony Burton.
The non-original music used in the film includes a synthesizer adaptation that Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind did of Dies Irae, as Hector Berlioz had used it in his Symphonie fantastique. We also hear excerpts from “Lontano,” by György Ligeti, and the first half of the third movement (“Adagio“) of Béla Bartók‘s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. From Krzysztof Penderecki, there are excerpts from “Ewangelia” and “Kanon Paschalny II” from Utrenja, as well as his “Awakening of Jacob” and “De Natura Sonoris” Nos. 1 and 2, his “Kanon,” and his “Polymorphia.” These are all either modern adaptations of classical music (Carlos/Elkind), classical modernism (Bartók), or post-war avant-garde classical (Penderecki/Ligeti), music originally intended just as expressive in itself or as experiments with sound…and yet here presented as ‘scary music.’
Contrasted with these are a few old-fashioned tunes, such as “Midnight, the Stars and You,” by Harry M Woods, Jimmy Campbell, and Reg Connelly, and “Home,” performed by Henry Hall and Gleneagles Hotel Band, among others. This music gives off a sense of…’Life just isn’t as it was back in the good old days,’ a nostalgic attachment to the past that hides, behind a superficial charm, a reactionary hatred of progressive social change.
Here is a link to quotes from the film.
The movie begins with a shot of a lake and an island in the middle of it, and forest and Colorado Rocky Mountains in the background, with Carlos’s and Elkind’s synthesizer rendition of Dies Irae. Next is a bird’s eye view of the car driven by Jack Torrance (Nicholson) going on a road between forests of trees, then up a mountain to the Overlook Hotel.
Such scenery is beautiful to behold, but the eerie, portentous music is at odds with such a picturesque charm. We feel, instead, a sense of the loneliness and isolation Jack and his family will feel when they’re in the hotel through the winter. This juxtaposition of superficial pleasantness and underlying nastiness will be a recurring theme in the movie.
The significance of the eerie feeling accompanying the pretty natural scenery will be known when we learn that the Overlook Hotel was built on an old Indian burial ground (a trope that would become a cliché in many 1980s horror films), where during construction of the hotel, the builders had to fight off Native American attacks. What is being established here is a confronting of the issue of the white man’s colonizing of aboriginal land, killing off any resistance to it. This issue will be the foundation of the other issues, as I’ll elaborate on later.
The synthesizer music alone is dark and haunting. If one knew that it is Dies Irae, the “Day of Wrath,” about the Day of Judgement, one would see far greater significance in how settler-colonialism, the genocide of the North American aboriginals, the other issues of social injustice I’ll go into later, and a final day of reckoning are all interconnected. We see the land of the aboriginals, land taken from them by the white man, whose descendants will do far more evil over the ensuing centuries; and if one were to read the text of Dies Irae, one would sense the depth of these men’s guilt.
In the Overlook Hotel, Jack meets Stuart Ullman (Nelson) for his job interview to be the hotel’s new caretaker for the coming winter. The Ullman of the film is not the “Officious little prick” of King’s novel; here, he’s quite a gentle, smiling, genial fellow.
As Jack’s employer, though, Ullman personifies capitalism, and with not only the juxtaposition of this job interview with the preceding scene of Jack’s drive through the formerly aboriginal landscape, but also Ullman’s soon-to-come comments about the Indian burial ground and fighting off the aboriginal attacks, we see the connection between colonialism and capitalism (for a contemporary example of this connection, recall the current ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the wish to convert the area into a set of resorts for vacationers…a whole beach of Overlook Hotels.
Ullman’s, as well as Jack’s, smiling throughout the job interview reflect that superficial pleasantness masking nastiness. Ullman is the easy-going boss explaining to Jack how the job is not physically demanding: he just has to do some repairs here and there, keep the boiler room running, and heat different parts of the hotel on a rotational, daily basis. Jack is smiling away and insisting that the job will be perfectly suited to him and his family, partly because, as with anyone trying to get a job, he wants to reassure the boss that he’s the right man to hire, and such reassuring involves some ass-kissing; it’s part of how a powerless worker has to deal with a capitalist.
Under this pleasant veneer, though, is the nasty reality about the job that Ullman has to be frank about with Jack. There’s a terrible feeling of loneliness and isolation that one can feel doing the caretaker job over the long winter months, and this led to a caretaker named Grady (Stone) killing his family back in 1970.
Under capitalism, there’s this idea that supporters of it promote: the taking-on of a job is a voluntary agreement between employer and employee rather than something the employee must do to live–it amounts to wage slavery. That a worker can just quit if he doesn’t like his job fails to grasp the fact that, if he even finds a new job to replace it, will it even be any better, or all it be (much) worse? The worker, always needing to sell his labour to live, isn’t the free agent the pro-capitalist claims he is. This issue is the unpleasant underbelly of the pleasant outer skin of the job one hopes to get.
The isolation and loneliness of the caretaker job, the underbelly Jack will confront soon enough, are representative of what Marx discussed as worker alienation. And alienation, as has been seen especially in the US over the past few decades, has led to many gun killings, rather like Jack’s violence at the climax of the movie.
So we see how a number of issues intersect already. The construction of a hotel, a business to make a profit, on an Indian burial ground, which includes the need to fight off and kill aboriginals trying to preserve and protect a sacred space, shows how settler-colonialism and capitalism intersect. That the job of maintaining this for-profit building involves a long spell of maddening loneliness, in which the caretaker would be haunted by ghosts (many, I suspect, being of murdered Native Americans), shows how worker alienation intersects with settler-colonialism and capitalism…if only symbolically.
Next, we have to deal with Jack’s alcoholism and abuse of little Danny (Lloyd). A doctor (played by Anne Jackson) is curious about an injury Danny had, one mentioned in passing by his mother, Wendy Torrance (Duvall), in her conversation with the doctor. Wendy says, with more of that saccharine smiling, that one night five months prior to this discussion, Jack had been drinking, came home late, and saw that Danny had scattered some important papers of Jack’s all over the room. The official explanation is that Jack ‘accidentally’ dislocated Danny’s arm by yanking the boy away from the papers with too much force. The doctor is not smiling after hearing this story.
We’ll notice here that this is yet another example of the attempt to hide nastiness behind a veil of pleasantness. Wendy, in trivializing Jack’s alcoholism and brutishness, is also demonstrating her subservience to him.
This leads to the next issue to intersect with those previously mentioned: the patriarchal family as represented here with the Torrances. We see in them the usual sex roles: Jack is the breadwinner, and Wendy is the housewife…though, oddly (or, perhaps not?), during their time in the Overlook, we see that it is Wendy who is checking over the hotel. Jack, who should be doing this, is instead bouncing a ball against a wall, kind-of-sort-of writing his novel, and slowly going insane.
We ought to look at the word patriarchy a little more carefully than usual, especially as it applies to Jack’s relationship with his family. We all know the word is used to refer to a male-dominated society, of course, but technically, it means “father-rule.” Danny is as male as Jack is, of course, but as a kid, he’s hardly dominant in any way over anyone, including Wendy, even with his “shining” power. It’s Jack, the father–just as did Grady, the father–who has the power, and who wields it so brutally.
This “father-rule” can be symbolic of which men in particular dominate society: the rich and politically powerful, those in leadership positions, not the ordinary, working-class men of the world. Of course, none of this is to deny, trivialize, or invalidate the painful experiences of powerlessness that all women and girls around the world suffer because of sexism, sex roles, and the patriarchal family. It’s just that we need to focus on which men in particular to blame, the powerful ones, when we work for solutions to these problems. Women’s liberation will come through socialism, not through the divisiveness of idpol.
As far as blaming working-class men like Jack is concerned when they help to perpetuate sexism, it would be more useful to focus on their dysfunctional solution of ‘punching down,’ rather than ‘punching up.’ Jack should be raising his fist in anger at the system that’s made him and his family so powerless, rather than raising an axe to kill Wendy and Danny with.
Wendy’s role in the film as submissive, weak, and frail (as opposed to her much stronger and more resourceful portrayal in King’s novel) demonstrates not only the issue of the patriarchal family, but also how this issue intersects with that of the white man’s genocide of the Native Americans. It has been noted by film critics that Duvall, through her clothing and long, thin black hair, is made to resemble a Native American. She dresses this way while in the hotel, as opposed to how she and Danny look in their home at the beginning of the film, in their red-white-and-blue clothing. We go from the pleasant, American-as-apple-pie look to the nasty look of one oppressed by the white man.
The hotel interior significantly has a lot of North American indigenous art on display, as well as other art that can be associated with aboriginals. I mentioned Jack’s bouncing of a ball against a wall: a Native American tapestry is on it. This, of course, is symbolic of the white man beating the aboriginals.
A nation built on the genocide of those who lived there before (as symbolized by building a hotel on an Indian burial ground) is hardly one that will grow into one based on freedom, justice, and equality, in spite of the myths of ‘American democracy’ that many have been brainwashed into believing. That is what Kubrick’s Shining is all about: hence, the intersecting of the aboriginal issue with those of capitalism, sexism, and racism…this last of which we must go into now.
As with the others, things start off superficially pleasant, as Dick Hallorann (Crothers) shows the Torrances–Wendy and Danny in particular–around such areas of the Overlook as the kitchen and the pantry. Hallorann is all smiles as he lists off all the delicious foods the Torrances will enjoy eating. He, also gifted with “the shining,” immediately senses Danny’s telepathic abilities, knowing the boy will be sensitive to the presence of all the ghosts in the hotel.
As a black man, Hallorann of course represents how his people have been victimized by American racism. He is the only one we see murdered by Jack, with an axe in the chest. He is referred to as a “nigger” by the ghost of Grady and Jack in the bathroom scene, where the latter wipes off a spill off the former’s jacket and warns him of his son’s interfering in the hotel’s affairs.
In all of this we can easily see how racism against blacks intersects with racism against the Native Americans. White supremacism, as we know, is used to justify not only the genocide of the aboriginals, but also the slavery of blacks. Such an attitude is clearly expressed when Jack says to Lloyd, the ghost bartender (Turkel), “White man’s burden,” as he is about to play for a drink.
Note also the significance of how the two killing fathers, Grady and Jack, are not only two white men, but also, the first is British, and the second is American. The order of the two men’s appearances and murder sprees in the hotel is particularly significant, as they represent the brutality first of British colonialism, then of American colonialism. And just as with Jack’s smiling first appearance in the film, so is ghost-Grady’s first appearance one of a gentle, polite, affable chap…until he shows his true colours in the bathroom scene, as he, frowning, would “be so bold” as to tell Jack about the need to ‘correct’ Danny.
The hotel is on an Indian burial ground, yet oddly, we never see any Native American ghosts. There’s all that aboriginal art everywhere in the hotel, though, as I mentioned above; it’s as if the hotel ate the remains of the natives, whose digested remains are all of that art, a cannibalism like the kind (which included the eating of two Miwok guides) Jack and Danny talk about in the car ride up the mountain to the hotel.
We don’t ever see aboriginal ghosts–only white ones–because the whole point is that the aboriginals are all gone. Even the memory of them is all but erased. The collective guilt of the white man has been repressed into the unconscious…and yet the repressed returns to consciousness, albeit in unrecognizable forms, hiding in plain sight (aboriginal art, white ghosts, Wendy’s clothing and hair in the hotel).
Many Americans–conservatives in particular, like Michael Medved in his book, The 10 Big Lies About America (Medved, pages 11-45)–are in denial about the genocide of the Native Americans as a basis for the beginnings of the country. They’ll make claims that the spread of diseases from whites to aboriginals, the massacres, and the forced displacements (clearly ethnic cleansing) did not intentionally or systematically cause most of the deaths, but such claims are nonsense. Violence was encouraged through payment. The government enacted laws, such as Andrew Jackson‘s Indian Removal Act of 1830, to displace aboriginals by the tens of thousands, causing many deaths among them from the hardships of the journey from where the whites wanted to settle to where the aboriginals were required to go.
Such denials can be said to be symbolized in The Shining by this ‘repression,’ as I described it above, in the replacement of the indigenous dead with the hotel’s aboriginal art and white ghosts. Being as sensitive as Danny is with his “shining,” he can sense the ghosts, particularly in the forms of Grady’s daughters and in his being lured by ghosts to room 237.
Jack’s seeing of the ghosts coincides with his slowly going mad, of course, for it is the contemplation of the white man’s guilt that is maddening, the confronting of it, as opposed to denying the genocide. Wendy doesn’t see the ghosts and other supernatural phenomena until the climax of the movie, when affairs have gotten so extreme in their violence that the consequences of genocide can no longer be denied by white people.
The guilt may be denied, but it keeps coming back to haunt the guilty. That’s what the motifs of recurrence can be said to represent. Think of the recurring patterns on the rugs and walls, the back-and-forth alteration of the sound of the wheels of Danny’s Big Wheel rolling on the hard floor vs their silence on the rugs, or “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” over and over again on the pages of his ‘manuscript.’ Similarly, Jack’s reincarnation as the hotel’s eternal caretaker, his having been in the Overlook back in 1921, and his resulting feelings of déjà vu.
The cyclical nature of events in the Overlook–the killing of aboriginals when building the hotel, the murders of the past, culminating in Grady’s and Jack’s, represent how a nation founded on genocide will return to murder again and again throughout its history. We see this in the history of the US, where apart from the Native American genocide, there is the great majority of the country’s history involving either waging or at least being somehow involved in wars; we see it in how Manifest Destiny inspired Hitler; and we see it in Israel’s taking of Palestinian land and continued ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians (backed by the US).
We get repetition in my favourite scene in the movie, when Danny confronts the Grady sister ghosts, who invite him to play with them…”forever, and ever, and ever”…a line Jack repeats to Danny: “I wish we could stay here forever, and ever, and ever.”
It’s been said that the spatial layout of the hotel makes no physical sense. One might try to attribute the inconsistencies of the layout to continuity errors, but that doesn’t make sense either, given Kubrick’s obsessive perfectionism. There are windows and doors that shouldn’t be there, rooms in one place at one time and in another place at another time, and furniture that appears and disappears from scene to scene.
In this sense, the hotel interior (which Wendy calls a maze) is rather like that labyrinthine hedge arrangement, in miniature on that table where Jack looks at the model of it, and the real one outside that the model dissolves into. (The hedge maze, incidentally, replaced the animal topiary hedges of the novel, those that come to life, because of limitations with the special effects of the time.)
The point is that the hotel is a trap from which one (usually) cannot escape. As a symbol of the US (which both dominates in its overseeing the affairs of everyone everywhere, and which overlooks its guilt and responsibility for all the wrongs it’s done), the Overlook is a place irrationally constructed, and a labyrinthine trap, because so is the country it represents.
Some may complain that the pacing of the plot is too slow. Such complaining misses the point. It’s slow because the growing evil is meant to be felt as insidious. Jack’s descent into madness is slow, and the tension of the music accordingly grows slowly, from the eeriness of the music of Carlos/Elkind in the beginning and the eeriness of that of Bartók early on and in the middle, to the extreme dissonance of Penderecki’s music leading up to and during the climax.
If we see The Shining as an allegory of the history of the US (or just about any nation founded on settler-colonialism), then it makes sense to see, from white people’s point of view, how the horrors only gradually build until the end. Sensitive Danny and Hallorann can see it from the beginning, like so many of us on the left and black activists, those powerless to do much about it; but many white Americans, like Wendy, are only now seeing the horrors of state-sanctioned violence.
Yet another thing that intersects with the issues of settler-colonialism, capitalism, racism, sexism, and family abuse is narcissism, and we can see Jack indulging in that, symbolically and literally. Though most people would dread the sense of isolation in being the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, Jack welcomes the job, for he enjoys his solipsism there. He doesn’t want society to be all around him. He wants other people to exist only as reflections and extensions of himself.
He gets irritable with Wendy, even if she just enters his writing room to talk about…anything. He flies into rages if she talks about leaving the hotel with Danny to get him to a doctor. The Overlook is like a Bower of Bliss for him: superficially pleasing, but trapping him in it and slowly eating him up.
There’s evidence of him being frustrated with his family right from the beginning. We see it in his face when he grins in exasperation at Danny ‘s saying he knows about cannibalism from the TV, and this is before the family has even reached the Overlook Hotel. He’s frustrated with his family because it’s a triadic relationship, so–to use Lacanian language–this puts him in a situation of dealing with the Other, where being with at least two other people means dealing with them on their own terms, rather than dealing with the other, where only one other is a reflection of oneself.
It is significant that whenever Jack has a conversation or interaction with a ghost, there’s a mirror behind the ghost. This is true of his interactions with Lloyd, Grady, or the naked woman he embraces and kisses in the bathroom. He enjoys these interactions because he’s in a dyadic relationship with each of them–they are each a reflection and extension of himself.
To use Lacanian language again, Jack is retreating from the sociocultural/linguistic world of the Symbolic, to reenter the dyadic, narcissistic world of the Imaginary. Such a retreat is extraordinary given his ambition to write a novel, yet it is explicable as soon as we realize the entire ‘novel’ is just the repetition of a single sentence–his writer’s block.
Jack’s seeing the ghosts in front of mirrors has him fuse the two sights together each time in his mind. As a result, each ghost becomes the narcissistic ideal-I before his eyes. Each ghost feeds his ego and represents an ideal either to be fused with sexually (the naked young woman ghost), to legitimize his alcoholism (Lloyd), or to be emulated as a perpetrator of uxoricide and filicide (Grady).
Narcissism is used as a defence against psychological fragmentation, and Jack’s belief in his ‘calling’ as the caretaker of the Overlook is an example of such a defence: hence, the firing-up of his rage at the mere thought of leaving the hotel. The Overlook as a sanctuary for his narcissism cannot last forever, though, and this is not solely because of the urgent need to get Danny out of there to see a doctor. His experience with the naked woman also shows this impermanence.
As I said above, the specular image in the mirror is an ideal-I, which one strives all one’s life to attain, ultimately failing. Jack would…attain, to use the word euphemistically, the naked young woman in front of the bathroom mirror because man’s desire is the desire of the Other, the wish to be what the Other wants, so Jack’s wanting her to want him is to see, narcissistically, his desire as idealized in her, to see her as an extension of himself, to see himself as her.
Her youth, beauty, and thinness are also the ideals of femininity in modern, career-woman society, supplanting the old ‘pleasantly plump’ ideal for the ‘barefoot-and-pregnant mothers’ of the past. These issues, of course, are also tied in with the values of the patriarchal family, and so we see how Jack’s narcissism in this manifestation intersects with the other issues mentioned above. The impermanence of the Overlook as a sanctuary for Jack’s narcissism is also seen in the girl’s sudden transformation into a cackling old woman with the mouldy skin of a decomposing body.
The switch from the young to the old nude woman, and the switch from Jack’s aroused to horrified reaction, are also a comment on society’s attitude toward prevailing norms of feminine beauty, as well as on the male addiction to that beauty. This addiction can also be seen in Dick Hallorann when in his Florida home, on the walls of which we see pictures of nude or seminude black women.
Jack rejects the Symbolic–that is, he rejects society (any people other than those as mirrors of his narcissistic self) and language (not only can’t he type any more than the one repeated sentence, but as he freezes in the hedge maze searching for Danny, his speech becomes unintelligible babbling and moaning). He also finds the dyadic Imaginary to be unreliable (the Overlook is a sanctuary of his narcissism that cannot last as such). The lack of the Symbolic and the Imaginary means that all he is left with is the Real, an undifferentiated state of being that cannot be symbolized or expressed through language…a traumatic, chaotic mess.
This messy Chaos is vividly expressed in that iconic deluge of blood splashing out from the elevator and filling up the room so much that it even hits and soaks the camera lens. It’s a redrum running amok. The Real is what results when there are no others, no ability to express oneself or make sense of a world of non-differentiation, and not even another person to reflect oneself against. It’s the trauma of total loneliness.
Danny has a sense of that inability to express and verbalize the Real when, in Tony’s voice, he tries to warn sleeping Wendy of Jack’s imminent attack with the axe by chanting “redrum” over and over. His use of her lipstick to write “REDRUM” on the door, with the second R backwards, represents the Real’s inability to be articulated, as does the word’s being intelligible only in the mirror reflection as “MURDER,” with the E and the second R backwards, too.
The patriarchal dominance of Jack is seen not just in his abusive treatment of Danny and his maniacal yelling at Wendy as noted above, but also in how, after hacking open the door to the room his wife and son are in, he says, “Wendy, I’m home.” We’re reminded of the husband of the 1950s coming in the house after finishing his day at work and calling out to his stay-at-home wife, “Honey, I’m home,” implying that he expects dinner to be ready for him.
Jack’s famous line, “Here’s Johnny!”–with that iconic shot of his maniacally smiling face through the hacked-out hole in the bathroom door, on his way to try to kill Wendy–was improvised by Nicholson. The black humour allusion to Ed McMahon introducing Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show (as well as that of the Big Bad Wolf calling out to the Three Little Pigs) is not only jarring in the context of the terror of the scene, but it’s also unintelligible to anyone unfamiliar with the show, including even Kubrick, who’d been living in England at the time. The line thus could be heard as yet another example of the Real’s inability to be expressed.
Now, Jack’s attempt on his wife’s and son’s lives, as well as Wendy’s discovery of all the ghosts and supernatural activity in the hotel, can be seen to represent the imperial boomerang, what happens eventually to the people of the imperial core, or to colonialists, when their repressive measures against the resisting colonized come back to harm them–a kind of colonial karma. This boomerang is happening in the US right now, where ICE has been trained by the IDF to use the very violence, originally used on the Palestinians, which is now being used on American citizens. Wendy sees white ghosts, but they’re really Native American ones, repressed into the unconscious and returning to consciousness in an unrecognizable form; that torrent of blood she sees from the elevator would be aboriginal red.
Jack, of course, dies with no redemption the way he does in King’s novel, this being one of the many reasons that King dislikes Kubrick’s adaptation of it. The Jack of the novel is flawed, of course, but sympathetic–not so for Kubrick’s Jack.
We must understand, though, that while Kubrick’s Shining is based on King’s novel, it’s a fundamentally different story (hence this being my second analysis of it), which explores almost totally different ideas and themes. Kubrick’s Jack shouldn’t be sympathetic or redeemed because he personifies so much of what is fundamentally wrong with a nation built on the genocide of aboriginals.
The perpetrating of mass murder doesn’t just change the killers; it also changes the descendants of those killers as they enjoy the privileges of living on stolen land. We see this mentality among conservative Americans who enthusiastically support open carry, yet who also defend ICE murdering Alex Pretti, who legally owned a gun that was holstered at the time, making him no threat at all to his murderers. We also see this mentality among Israelis who cheer on the continuing genocide in Gaza.
So King’s complaint that Kubrick’s “cold” ending is fine from the point of view of his novel, yet that cold ending is perfectly fitting for the film. The kind of people that Kubrick’s Jack represent do leave us cold: they keep coming back, as Jack did in his reincarnation from 1921, in that photo, aptly dated July 4th, from the Gold Room, a place where the wealthy American elite can enjoy ‘the good old days,’ dancing and trampling on an aboriginal grave.
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